Kristof argues that American eighth-graders' math skills are
humiliatingly bad, citing examples of problems that students in Ghana,
Iran, Indonesia, Armenia, Turkey, and Palestine can solve and American
eighth-graders can't.Kristof's basic point is correct: American students really are bad at
math, particularly at applying what they've learned in the real world.
Math teachers and elected officials from both parties are right to be
concerned. But American kids aren't really worse than students in Ghana
or Armenia. And Kristof's method — cherry-picking problems from a test
on which American students, on average, do pretty well in comparison —
actually undermines what he's trying to argue.

What Kristof gets wrong
The problem, as Bob Somerby pointed out:
the questions Kristof picked, from the Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Survey, a standardized test of eighth-graders,
are terrible examples. American students didn't answer those questions
well compared with their peers around the world. But they performed much
worse on the questions he cites than on the test as a whole.When you look at the entire test, American
eighth-graders aren't bad at all. They did better than average on many
questions. And overall, American students scored slightly above average — worse than students in Korea, Singapore, and Japan, but on par withFinland's celebrated test-takers. This could make you wonder why there's a panic about math education at all. Different international tests measure different things, and some make the US look worse than others.Read more...

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Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.